An annotated bibliography of the printed works of James Petiver (c.1663–1718)

Abstract

The works of James Petiver have a complicated publishing history. Apart from his more substantial publications, Musei Petiveriani (1695–1703) and Gazophylacii naturæ et artis (1702–1711), which were chiefly based on specimens in his collection and were issued in multiple parts, Petiver also published nearly thirty shorter articles and tracts, some of them merely hand-bills. Many of these publications were produced in small numbers and are scarce in their original imprints. However, long after Petiver’s death, James Millan published two editions (in 1764 and 1767) of Petiver’s work which were assembled partly from unsold copies of the originals, and partly through re-setting and abridging others that were otherwise unavailable. Petiver also contributed 35 articles to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and has previously been acknowledged as the author of a further four for The Monthly Miscellany: or, Memoirs for the Curious, a rare, short-lived periodical whose contributors were generally anonymous. However, this study concludes that nearly 50 additional articles that appeared in this journal between 1707 and 1710 were written by Petiver, several of which are the original versions of articles which were published in a re-set format by Millan in 1767. In other cases, articles first published there prove to be the basis for expanded accounts that Petiver published subsequently. An additional article was published in a similarly rare periodical, Memoirs of Literature, in 1714. All 158 of his published articles, wherever they appeared, are listed and indexed, and cross-references are provided where articles appear in more than one version.